20 Ways to Share the Garden4Good Ethos
I thought I’d take some time to share why we’ve chosen Garden4Good.co.uk as the domain name for our garden website.
Garden4Good is a mantra that took root (the pun entirely deliberate) earlier this year when we decided to formalise our garden’s fundraising activities, creating an Association through which to route our events and garden related activities. We asked ourselves what the Association should stand for, what would its aims and objectives be? It felt to us important to keep these very broad, to take our cue from the garden itself and recognise that everything is connected. And from there, Garden4Good was born; an ethos that each decision we make about the garden gives us an opportunity to do good, and that our aim would be to work towards being a Garden4Good.
Once we started to think about it more deeply, we realised that good is something that can manifest itself in gardens and gardening in so many ways. So for this blog, I’ve challenged myself to come up with 20 examples to underpin this theory – 20 ways in which gardens and gardening can do good, in the widest sense, for the world. These examples aren’t necessarily things that we’re doing right now in Quinton Old Rectory Garden (though many are things we’d like to incorporate into our approach); but they’re all actions that strike us as fitting the Garden4Good mantle.
So here goes:-
1. Arranging and hosting charitable fundraising events in our gardens.
2. Sharing our gardens (having a friend round for an outdoor cuppa or open to hundreds through the NGS) so that the pleasure of these spaces can be widely enjoyed.
3. Understanding the benefits of being in our gardens (and of gardening in particular) to our overall health and wellbeing;
4. Using our gardens to encourage artistic creativity in its various forms; garden sculpture, poetry, performance, physical art;
5. Learning about the use of plants and flowers from our gardens for medicinal and therapeutic purposes and using that knowledge to keep well;
6. Donating yew clippings to Cancer charities so that they can be used in the manufacture of chemotherapy drugs;
7. Planting mindfully, to ensure bio-diversity and support creatures great and small.
8. Creating garden habitats suitable for different wildlife; birdboxes, bug-hotels, log piles…;
9. Taking inspiration and materials from the garden to craft and in the process rediscover often-forgotten skills;
10. Growing our own fruits and vegetables organically and appreciating each plateful our gardens provide;
11. Creating a herb garden to add flavour and freshness to life;
12. Composting! Converting all our waste food into organic nutrition for our gardens;
13. Harvesting our Autumn bounty and alchemising this into jams, jellies, pies, syrups, chutneys that we can enjoy, or gift, or sell to fundraise;
14. Germinating plants, nurturing seedlings and taking cuttings and arranging a plant sale to raise funds for causes we care about;
15. Keeping physically fit through gardening;
16. Harvesting rainwater to water pots, greenhouses and veg patches;
17. Sharing our knowledge of gardening with others by arranging garden experience days, giving talks to local groups or blogging;
18. Using our gardens to teach children about nature, about the cycles of life, about where food comes from;
19. Bringing nature into our homes for seasonal decoration with cut flowers and foliage, pinecones, seed-heads, berries;
20. And finally, just being in our gardens, breathing in nature, clearing our heads of thought and allowing our minds to rest.
Maybe you can think of other examples (and I’d love it if you’d share these with me)…but as a start point, the list of twenty above gives me real cause for optimism that Garden4Good is something many of us already embrace. Let’s see if we can grow this movement!
And in this remember – “the smallest action is better than the greatest intention.”